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It is pretty big in engineering. Labview or VEE. TLDR: the more complex the program becomes, the worse it is to use. I used it to easily connect to a piece of
by aSockPuppeteer 6y ago
It is pretty big in engineering. Labview or VEE. TLDR: the more complex the program becomes, the worse it is to use.
I used it to easily connect to a piece of lab equipment, reset it, set whatever settings I want, run a test, and then log the output to a file. I could setup a test then walk away and return to data. Doing the tests manually would take many months.
Both have labels as remarks/comments and you can easily put in a switch statement to test new code or use highlighting to see exactly where the program is running albeit slowly.
One of the fun things to do was circle a repetitive task then turn it into a function. A large program requires a large screen to see it all. Widescreens are terrible for it.
After basic settings and availability in libraries, it is better to move to a text language. Visual programming is a quick and dirty solution.
- Psychlist 6y agoWe have a Labview program for our circuit board tester and it is a bit of a nightmare. At least with visual coding it is obvious, literal "spaghetti code". My only experience with Labview was in another job writing a DLL that it could import so the poor sucker working on the code could do a bunch of complex state machine stuff without having to drag "wires" all over the place in Labview. That ended up with a design pattern that was "route inputs to DLL function, route output to next stage" that turned out to be much easier to maintain. Partly because it enforced modularisation, and partly just because a series of if statements and function calls is easier to read than diagram. https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019Ls1SAE https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z000... Also, Lego have a whole series of graphical languages for their electronics, and those are very cool but extremely limited. Once you get past "when this switch is pressed make this motor go" it is easier to hit the textual language.
- MH15 6y agoSimulink has the ability to make Blocks out of Matlab (or any FFI supporting language) code and run them in the simulation loop. We used this for state machines at our lab.
- chrismatheson 6y agoI believe the Lego mindstorms stuff was actually lobbies under the hood? I seem the rememberer the NI folks handing out large mindstorms sets as pressies to engineers because they had a partnership with Lego. It was semi common to see engineers using the “big boy” tool, Labview to play with some Lego mindstorms actuators etc